PRINCETON NJ LINK

A New Year of Music & Healing at Princeton University Concerts
January 06, 2026

PRINCETON, NJ – After revelatory events with award-winning choreographer Mark Morris and director Peter Sellars in 2025, Princeton University Concerts (PUC) continues its 2025-26 Music & Healing programming in the new year with community events and performances united by the 2025-26 series' theme: how art helps us navigate endings. These Spring 2026 events explore how music and creativity respond to urgent global realities, including climate change, war, and cultural tensions. World-renowned violinists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Lisa Batiashvili anchor these programs.

The season culminates on Wednesday, April 29, 2026 at 7:30PM at Richardson Auditorium with Sounding Defiance: Georgia & Ukraine, featuring Lisa Batiashvili in conversation and performance. In 2014, following Russia's invasion of Crimea, Batiashvili commissioned composer Igor Loboda to write Requiem for Ukraine—a profoundly personal act shaped by the echoes of Russian aggression that had already marked her native Georgia. Since then, she has emerged as a leading artistic advocate for both nations, using music as an act of resistance and cultural preservation. Batiashvili is joined by Ara Guzelimian, Artistic and Executive Director of the Ojai Music Festival and former Dean and Provost of The Juilliard School, in a conversation interwoven with live musical performance by Batiashvili and Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili.

In advance of this program, PUC presents two free and low-cost community programs developed in partnership with the Princeton Public Library (PPL) and the Princeton Garden Theatre, inviting audiences to engage with the themes of war, memory, and cultural endurance through literature and film.

On Thursday, January 22 at 12PM, Princeton Public Library staff will lead a discussion of Leo Vardiashvili's debut novel Hard By a Great Forest, set in postwar Georgia. Through a deeply personal narrative shaped by displacement and return, the novel examines the long shadow of conflict and occupation. This community-wide book discussion—offered both in person at PPL and via Zoom—creates space to reflect on the human costs of geopolitical violence and the healing power of storytelling across artistic forms. The program is free, with registration required.

On Wednesday, March 18 at 7PM, PUC joins PPL and the Princeton Garden Theatre to present a screening of the documentary Porcelain War, directed by Brendan Bellomo. From an Oscar®-winning producer and former war correspondent, the film offers a visually striking portrait of Ukrainian artists creating amid active warfare. Filmed in real time against the backdrop of invasion, Porcelain War follows three creatives who resist destruction through painting, sculpture, and imagination—asserting art as an act of survival. Tickets are available through PUC.

A centerpiece of the spring is Patricia Kopatchinskaja's Dies Irae, presented as a PUC Special Event on Thursday, March 26 at 7:30PM in the Princeton University Chapel. Part concert, part installation, Dies Irae is a searing, semi-staged meditation on the end of the world—confronting war and the climate crisis as twin forces of human self-destruction. Reimagining the ancient "Day of Wrath" chant through music both old and new, the work weaves together compositions by Giacinto Scelsi, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, George Crumb, Jimi Hendrix, Antonio Lotti, John Dowland, and Galina Ustvolskaya.

The performance features Conrad Tao on piano and harpsichord, double bassists Zachary Cohen and Nina Bernat, members of the Princeton University Chapel Choir under the direction of Nicole Aldrich, and musicians from the Richardson Chamber Players, comprising Princeton University Music Department faculty and students.

"Spending a year thinking about endings may sound dark," says Dasha Koltunyuk, curator of PUC's Music & Healing series, "but it has opened a portal to some of the most inspiring ways art meets the world. This spring, we invite our community to explore how music can be a potent response to forces of erasure and destruction—and a sustaining, imaginative force for what comes next."

Princeton University Concerts
July 22, 2009

Princeton University Concerts
July 22, 2009